Men, machines, memories

The major characters in Five Skies
are men at work and men on the run. It's not surprising that they
are men of few words as well. Art Key, a 40-something Hollywood
stunt engineer fleeing a guilty conscience, and Ronnie Panelli, a
19-year-old petty thief dodging the law, join aging ranch hand
Darwin Gallegos for a summer-long construction project on the Idaho
high plateau, where shop talk stands in for soul searching.

Though it takes author Ron Carlson some time to move
beyond these well-worn types, and the construction jargon further
slows the reader, gradually the stoic narration guides us deep into
his characters' inner lives.

Perhaps without the gradual
beginning, the understated drama of this quiet and often poetic
book would disappear beneath the memories from which each man
flees. Their heavy losses in the past far outweigh the things the
men carry in their pickup truck. Ostensibly, they are here to
construct a motorcycle jump across a gaping ravine for a television
stunt. In actuality, they simply want to be anywhere other than
where they were. Tiny dots on a punishing landscape, Ronnie, Art
and Darwin heal and thrive in this least welcoming of environments.

As the characters become familiar, so too does their
language. The technical lexicon settles naturally into the story's
drama, as in this close call with a road grader: "It was a
spectacular sight, the pale elongated machine run off the edge of
the escarpment, rocking there in weird balance, its front tires
hanging into the ravine, the rear tires, motorbox, drivercab, and
Ronnie Panelli tilted up, buoying almost a foot off the ground."
The machine's driver becomes just another automotive part,
teetering hundreds of feet above an indifferent river; he's almost
an afterthought, which only intensifies the emotional impact.

But Five Skies
is weakened by its thin supporting cast. Ronnie's love interest,
Traci, and her stalwart mother, not to mention two sets of
disgruntled townies, seem more like plot contrivances than fully
realized characters. At one point, the three protagonists watch
their camp being vandalized from across the ravine. The vandals
read like flat caricatures of ignorant hicks, and Ronnie, Art and
Darwin neither react to the attack nor reflect on it.

Carlson's unquestioned talent as a short-story writer emerges most
clearly when he examines the past. He uses his characters' memories
to construct a foundation on which they will try to rebuild their
broken lives. Witness Ronnie, the former juvenile delinquent,
boldly confronting another group of vandals while out with Traci:
"No matter what was about to happen here, it would continue through
the aeons," Carlson writes. "He'd never thought this way before,
and it made him uneasy. He was becoming someone else. He laid the
rifle in the dirt and stepped toward the men." Growth this pure is
rare, and connection in a world this stark and uninviting is
hard-won.